|
Is This Seat Taken? In Front Rows of New Ballparks, Not Yet
Odd patterns have been forming inside New York’s two shiny new baseball stadiums, ones not seen in years. Clumps of empty blue and green seats are painfully obvious because many of them are in the best sections or right behind home plate, while fans are concentrated in the more remote parts of Yankee Stadium and Citi Field.
After spending $2.3 billion on new stadiums packed with suites, restaurants and the latest technology, the Mets and the Yankees expected fans to embrace their new homes and pay top dollar for the privilege. Almost every team that has built a new stadium in the recent past has seen an immediate surge in attendance.
Instead, the Mets and the Yankees face a public relations nightmare and possibly millions of dollars in lost revenue after failing to sell about 5,000 tickets — including some of the priciest seats — to each of their first few games after last week’s openers.
The empty seats are a fresh sign that the teams might have miscalculated how much fans and corporations were willing to spend, particularly during a deep recession. Whatever the reason, the teams are scrambling to comb over their $295- to $2,625-a-seat bald spots.
“I’m sure they’re thinking, ‘It’s just April,’ ” Jon Greenberg, executive editor of the Team Marketing Report, said of the lack of sellouts. “But it’s lost revenue they anticipated getting. This is the worst possible time to debut a stadium.”
The teams are loath to cut prices for fear of alienating existing ticket-holders. Letting fans from other sections move to the premium seats behind home plate and above the dugouts could backfire in the same way.
The price of an average premium ticket is $510 for the Yankees and $150 for the Mets. The prices of nonpremium tickets rose 76 percent this year at Yankee Stadium, which goes a long way toward offsetting losses from unsold premium seats.
“But it doesn’t look good,” said Maury Brown, president of the Business of Sports Network, a research Web site. “It’s the Yankees, not the Nationals. On television, it stands out like a big sore thumb.”
Hal Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ general managing partner, said recently that “small amounts of our tickets might be overpriced.”
Still, the teams are trying to drum up sales. The Yankees have hired Douglas Elliman Worldwide Consulting, which promotes and markets real estate projects for developers, to sell premium seats to high-end residential customers. The team has also extensively advertised the availability of the high-priced seats, and invited potential buyers to visit the Stadium at a Select-a-Seat weekend last month.
Unable to sell season-ticket plans for about 100 of their best seats, the Mets have been auctioning them off one game at a time. At least one fan took the bait, paying $7,500 for two seats behind home plate on opening night.
The Mets have suffered the indignity of watching a court-appointed trustee sell the two season tickets bought by Bernard L. Madoff, the financier who admitted to running a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme that counted the team’s principal owner, Fred Wilpon, as one of its victims.
An auction for the seats concluded on eBay Tuesday night, with the winning bid coming in at $38,100, considerably below their face value.
Neither team seemed worried that some of the premium seats — any seat that comes with an amenity, like waiter service or access to a dining club — were unfilled. Some of them could have owners who simply did not show up, which hurts food, parking and merchandise sales. Other seats may be part of partial season ticket plans that did not include games played last week.
“If someone’s not there at the moment, that doesn’t mean it’s unsold,” said Dave Howard, the vice president for operations for the Mets. So far, he said, fans are spending about 60 percent more on food, beverages and merchandise than they did at Shea Stadium. “There’s a lot of circulation in the ballpark.”
Many fans with tickets are trying to recoup what they can by selling some of them online well below face value. More than 10,000 tickets (about 20 percent of the ballpark) for the Yankees’ game against the Oakland Athletics on Wednesday were available, a handful for as little as $5, according to FanSnap.com, which scans the Web sites of five dozen ticket resellers.
“More season-ticket holders than ever before are selling into the market,” said Michael Janes, FanSnap’s chief executive. “Some people need to generate cash to pay the rent.”
The teams’ sluggish starts on the field — including the Yankees’ 22-4 loss Saturday to the Cleveland Indians — have not helped generate extra buzz. Attendance across the major leagues has dipped this season, and plenty of premium seats are empty in other ballparks. Many basketball and hockey teams have also had attendance declines.
But the slow start in New York is striking considering how much the teams here spent to build and promote their parks. Like airlines that break even on economy tickets and rely on first-class travelers to turn a profit, the teams need to sell their most exclusive seats to help repay the hundreds of millions of dollars of tax-free bonds they issued to finance their new parks.
The unfilled seats in New York are even more glaring compared with how robust sales have been for previous stadium openings. The Baltimore Orioles sold out 67 of their 80 home dates in 1992, when Camden Yards opened. The Cleveland Indians sold out 36 games in the strike-shortened season in 1994, and were filled to capacity 455 consecutive games from 1995 to 2001.
After moving to their new park in 2001, the Houston Astros drew 3.1 million fans, 300,000 more than they ever attracted at the far larger Astrodome. The Pittsburgh Pirates, a perennial second-division team, sold 2.4 million tickets in 2001 when PNC Park opened, 700,000 more than they ever sold at Three Rivers Stadium.
Mets officials say they are encouraged that they have already sold the equivalent of 25,000 full season tickets, 7 percent more than in 2008. Most of the team’s 15-game plans are sold out, and single-game ticket sales for April and May are 87 percent higher than in the same period last year.
Randy Levine, the Yankees’ president, said last week that attendance at the second home game was proportionately ahead of last year’s pace. Levine also said that 80 to 85 percent of the Stadium’s 4,000 premium seats had been sold for the full season.
For next season, the Yankees plan to raise premium ticket prices 4 percent.
Richard Sandomir contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/sport ... f=baseball
|
